Environmental concerns regarding excessive energy consumption has prompted many industries to modify their commercial products and/or equipment designs to conserve more energy. Consistent with this objective of energy conservation, the refrigeration and air-conditioning industries are constantly seeking to improve energy efficiency of vapor compression refrigeration and air-conditioning systems. For example, additives have been added to the refrigerant/lubricant mixture in order to increase the efficiency of vapor compression refrigeration and air-conditioning systems. The additive primarily suggested was tetraethylene glycol dimethyl ether or tetraglyme. However, tetraglyme, and similar glycol ethers with ethylene repeat units have been known to exhibit negative reproductive health effects, which clearly makes them undesirable for use in this application.
Other suggestions have been proposed to address this problem including changes in the design of refrigeration and air-conditioning systems. Unfortunately, many of these suggestions introduce additional complications or disadvantages into the refrigeration and air-conditioning systems.
Accordingly, there is a need for non-toxic, performance-enhancing additives that will improve the energy efficiency and the capacity of vapor-compression refrigeration and air-conditioning systems.